nderstood.

For nine days Jan raced his dogs into the South. On the tenth they came
to Le Pas. It was night when they stopped before the little log hotel,
and the gloom hid the twitching in Jan's face.

"You will stay here--to-night?" asked the woman.

"Me go back--now," said Jan.

Cummins' wife came very close to him. She did not urge, for she, too,
was suffering the torture of this last parting with the "honor of the
Beeg Snows." It was not the baby's face that came to Jan's now, but the
woman's. He felt the soft touch of her lips, and his soul burst forth
in a low, agonized cry.

"The good God bless you, and keep you, and care for you evermore, Jan,"
she whispered. "Some day we will meet again."

And she kissed him again, and lifted the child to him, and Jan turned
his tired dogs back into the grim desolation of the North, where the
Aurora was lighting his way feebly, and beckoning to him, and telling
him that the old life of centuries and centuries ago was waiting for
him there.

BUCKY SEVERN

Father Brochet had come south from Fond du Lac, and Weyman, the
Hudson's Bay Company doctor, north through the Geikee River country.
They had met at Severn's cabin, on the Waterfound. Both had come on the
same mission--to see Severn; one to keep him from dying, if that was
possible, one to comfort him in the last hour, if death came. Severn
insisted on living. Bright-eyed, hollow-cheeked, with a racking cough
that reddened the gauze handkerchief the doctor had given him, he sat
bolstered up in his cot and looked out through the open door with glad
and hopeful gaze. Weyman had arrived only half an hour before. Outside
was the Indian canoeman who had helped to bring him up.

It was a glorious day, such as comes in its full beauty only in the far
northern spring, where the air enters the lungs like sharp, warm wine,
laden with the tang of spruce and balsam, and the sweetness of the
bursting poplar-buds.

"It was mighty good of you to come up," Severn was saying to the
doctor. "The company has always been the best friend I've ever
had--except one--and that's why I've hung to it all these years,
trailing the sledges first as a kid, you know, then trapping, running,
and--oh, Lord!"

He stopped to cough, and the little black-frocked missioner, looking
across at Weyman, saw him bite his lips.

"That cough hurts, but it's better," Severn apologized, smiling weakly.
"Funny, ain't it, a man like me coming down wit